3D modeling helps planners find gaps in existing development for communities inside the Adirondack Park
By Tim Rowland
Using cutting-edge mapping and urban-development software, Warren County planners are hoping to show some of the county’s 20 hamlets how they might add affordable housing.
Hamlets, which make up just 3.4% of privately held Adirondack Park land in Warren County, have been designated by Adirondack Park Agency land-use regulations as areas of generally unrestricted growth. Housing advocates believe they hold the key to adding much needed new homes in ways that maintain the community character and are acceptable to local residents.
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But expanding hamlet boundaries can be tricky because their boundaries typically cannot be enlarged to accommodate new housing without public sewer, while public sewer is financially unfeasible without existing housing hookups to pay for it.
Maximizing hamlets’ existing space
Warren County, in a new initiative called Thriving Hamlets, is sidestepping this problem by focusing less on hamlet expansion than by making more efficient use of the hamlets’ existing space. “Instead of fighting the APA, let’s use their own playbook,” said Warren County Planner Ethan Gaddy.
This strategy, known as “in-filling,” can add housing density through tweaks in infrastructure or local zoning laws—for example, identifying empty or inefficiently used building lots, or determining how a relaxed setback regulation could allow more housing on an individual parcel—within the existing boundaries. Once this in-filling is accomplished, a better argument can be made for expanding hamlet boundaries in communities that want to go that route.
According to its mission statement, Thriving Hamlets — funded in part with a grant from the Department of Environmental Conservation — will map buildable land, infrastructure, zoning regulations, and environmental constraints within each hamlet. Based on these factors, it will identify targeted infrastructure enhancements and zoning adjustments that could produce expanded development potential.
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The APA encouraged density in hamlets and limited it elsewhere to prevent sprawl and haphazard growth. But lacking the dedicated mayor-and-council representation of a village, hamlets have wanted for planning and a focused development.
As in all Adirondack counties, hamlets in Warren County come in all shapes and sizes, from bustling full-service communities such as North Creek and Johnsburg to former industrial sites or rail stations that have withered into a collection of a few houses.
The differences in 3D modeling
Warren County Geographic Information System (GIS) Administrator Sara Frankenfeld said Warren County will initially focus on about half of its larger hamlets for 3D modeling.
GIS maps mark the land based on natural or man-made features, from slope steepness and annual rainfall to the location of homes and fire hydrants. These maps can then be overlaid to determine specific conditions that otherwise would not be obvious. One example might be to correlate road salt applications with well-water salinity.
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Computer modeling makes this possible in a way that is easy for the public to understand, Frankenfeld said. “We’re using some pretty cool technology,” she said. While GIS itself has been around for decades, 3D GIS mapping has “exploded.”
True to its name, the software is well-known in urban planning, but seldom if ever in rural settings. With 3D modeling, town officials and hamlet residents can gain a better understanding of what their communities will look like with small changes in zoning law related to, say, setback or building height regulations.
While trained engineers might be able to conceptualize these changes on flat maps, “a lot of people don’t visualize 2D very well,” Frankenfeld said. “This lets them see what actual zoning changes would look like.”
How Warren County communities could add housing
Community buy-in is critical to any change. “We’re not trying to promote some top-down vision,” Gaddy said. “The community has to be on board with any changes.”
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Towns are allowed to passively accept APA zoning or add their own layer of zoning to hamlets. But some towns have started to rethink zoning law because it can run contrary to housing density. It might prohibit an upper floor, or a second dwelling on a single lot — measures that have been picked up in standard, cut-and-paste zoning codes without taking unique Adirondack conditions into consideration.
Thriving Hamlets will inventory key pieces of information, such as population, existing housing, sidewalks and vacant lots, as well as existing sewer and water lines and where there might be potential for more. It will also project how many additional people the communities could house with these improvements.
Planners are in the initial phases of the project and have been accumulating data and starting to draft models, Frankenfeld said. The completed models will be presented to communities individually between the fall of 2025 and spring of 2026.
Residents will, in computer simulations, be able to toggle back and forth among a variety of options to see what options they like best. “It’s all the stuff that back in the ’80s they would have been doing with Mylar sheets,” Gaddy said.
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And we can turn these houses into air b and b’s .